Berlin – Women apologize more often than men. This was found out by researchers at Victoria University in Wellington, Australia in 1989. Since then, there have not only been dozens of articles in psychology and women’s magazines that revolve around the phenomenon, but also a number of case studies. Are women just more polite? It can hardly be assumed that they did more. Or has the word Sorry long since become a code that stands for something else?
Experts at Canada’s Waterloo University discovered in 2011 that women are more likely to see the need to apologize. At the beginning of the year, a team of reporters from the weekly newspaper Die Zeit again diagnosed a wave of cross-gender apologies. It gets exciting when you take a closer look at the facial expressions of the bitter pardons – especially those of the men.
The filmmaker Julia Niemann and the dramaturge Leonie Seibold have collected over 700 posts of public apologies on the Instagram channel “Apologizing Men” over the past few months. Celebrities like the former US President John F. Kennedy, the British singer Morrissey and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek will be there. There are also film clips, drawings and text messages. The message: I’m sorry – but somehow not either.
Slavoj Žižek withdraws his apology
The selected types often smile, sometimes they even withdraw their apologies, as in the case of Žižek: “I’m sorry if I was too long. But on the other hand: Fuck you, I’m not really sorry. ”So the man after a speech that was too long.
The organizers told Deutschlandfunk that their project began with a “kind of phenomenological curiosity” in times of Cancel Culture and MeToo. “What are you apologizing for? How do you apologize? ”This gave rise to the ambition“ to depict a picture of society or morals or perhaps even a human history on the basis of the missteps of men. ”
How much the portrayed men have thought about their misconduct and how serious they mean it with their sorry, the users can now speculate and discuss. But actually it’s a shame that no women were included in the series. No matter whether they are being honest or not, they tend to be better at apologizing than men – after all, according to the study mentioned at the beginning, they should have more practice with it.
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